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Tom Bicknell: How to juggle being a paramedic during a pandemic with starting your own business.

TLDRoffon

Tom Bicknell is the founder of Guide Base, an Airbnb-type platform for booking adventure guides, who recently graduated with a BSc in Paramedic Science and won a £2500 prize sponsored by Santander in the Enterprise Challenge 2020.

Can you introduce yourself? 

My name is Tom, I have recently graduated from UoG and founded Guide Base. Which is an online platform which allows you to book directly with outdoor guides for outdoor adventures, a bit like Airbnb, but instead of accommodation, there's adventure.

How did the business idea come about and develop?

I'm a keen rock climber and mountaineer and I found that the activity centers didn't incorporate the sort of trip that I wanted, and the individual guides were hard to reach. Facebook groups with private guides with qualifications had been created with thousands of guides ready to go, so I thought it would be a great idea to create a platform similar to how Airbnb works that allows outdoor adventurers to be able to contact these great guides directly and book through one convenient platform, so we created Guide Base.

The Generator has been really great and honestly, I was blown away with the competition along with the professionalism of it all, and in addition to the financial prize, the networking from this has been fantastic.

What have you been doing since winning a prize from the Enterprise Challenge?

Academically I graduated as a paramedic from UoG. I have been chatting with investors ever since from the pitches that have been shown online or have attended themselves or have had a connection to the challenge. It is certainly the fastest start up I've been involved with and I think the Generator has been the cause of that. You also get a great understanding of lean business plans and what you need to do in order to start a business if you aren't familiar with it.

Do you have any advice with investment or Angels?

With Guide Base it's the first time that I have actively sought investment and they are very good at telling you where you will fail and it knocks you back but if you take it as constructive feedback, adapt and pivot the platform in order to improve upon it and then go back and say I appreciate you didn't like this, I've changed it and here are the results/reaction from the market and see if they are then interested.

My mentor was useful for bouncing ideas off, when creating the pitch decks, compiling the research and the plans, it was having a second pair of eyes to highlight errors or areas that weren't as clear.

As you've just graduated, have you decided to focus on the business or follow your degree?

I am going to focus on Guide Base for a year, I think that if I tried both, one or both would suffer. The plan is to take a step back for a year, I will continue with medical work on the side which will help with giving me a salary so the money can be used in Guide Base.

You can watch the full interview on our Instagram page.